Talking shop in Carnegie

April 27 2003By John Elder

Safeway, Carnegie, the seat of Hotham, Crean country: she was new to the area, the woman muttering at the meat case. There was no organic free-range chicken on sale, and she seemed to take this as further evidence that her life was now truly blighted.

"I guess it's sold out, maybe they've got more out the back," said her husband, a beefy boy in his 30s,, eyes twinkling with a cheerful optimism that clearly got on her nerves. "Let's just ask somebody."

It looked as if she was shaking her head very slowly, by way of reply. Instead she was looking for a sign that free-range chicken had ever been on sale in that supermarket, that it would be there some other time.

Suddenly she made a scoffing sound, and her whole body shook with it. A Kim Beazley moment, you might say; from the days when he affected a learned statesman-like pose, and he talked in long elegant strings of steam. The scoff was memorable.

The husband had haplessly continued with his positive pragmatism - "There's bound to be a deli in Koornang Road" - and dangerously missed the point. ");document.write("

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She began with a sigh of withering weariness, "Aw, for God's sake!"

Then, in her own way, she went on to say she was sick of him putting a happy spin on everything, fed up with him offering solutions to problems he didn't fully understand. She didn't use so many words. Instead, she simply declared: "Our old supermarket had everything we wanted."

He gently shrugged, gave a little smile. Despite the faded Nirvana T-shirt, the full head of hair, the biceps, this chap was beginning to look a lot like John Howard.

They moved along. He found some fillet steak marked down, held it up for her inspection. She seemed blind to it all now.

Generally people don't like to be bugged when they're pushing a supermarket trolley. Especially one that's fully laden. Their trolley was brimming. Yet they seemed the perfect people to ask the big questions: What's it like living in Crean country?

Does the unpleasantness between Simon Crean and Kim Beazley threaten the future of the nation in general, and the path of their lives in particular?

The chap did the talking. His name was Paul. He tried to introduce his wife as Lisa, but she half-pretended not to know him.

Cheerfully Paul told their story: They had once hoped to buy a house in Elwood. Then settled on Elsternwick. And then Caulfield. "But real estate prices kept going up."

And so it was that their dreams shifted even further east: last week they moved into an old three-bedroom house in Carnegie. "It's a nice street. Most of the houses are old and sturdy. It's a shame there aren't a few more trees, but..."

He described the locals as "a good mix, a lot of Asian students and solid working-class people, not too many yuppies, real people". And then he had an epiphany. "I suppose it's the heartland."

And Simon Crean is their elected member of Parliament. He pondered this with the wisdom of a frontier pioneer: "Oh well, we're Labor voters and I think he's got integrity. That counts for a lot out here."

This was too much for Lisa. One side of her face lifted up, such that the side of her mouth was swallowed by her squinting eye. And in that moment she became Simon Crean. "So what?" she said. She went on to talk down Crean's chances of survival, the chances of Beazley finding a useful stride.

"From what I can see, everybody out here (in Crean country) is in love with John Howard." And that's all there was.